IJiinself sin, is founded on the moral impossibility that a nature, as distinguished from a person, can sin or be guilty.
When it is said that we derive a sinful nature from Adam, and -iiat guilt as well as pollution attaches to the nature of fallen men, the doctrine is, that we, and all who derive that nature from Adam, are ])ersonally sinful and guilty. We are born, as the Apostle says, the children of wrath. It is not an impersonal nature which is guilty, for this would be a contradiction, but persons whose im- manent, subjective state is opposed to the character and law of God. All this, however, is denied concerning Christ. These theologians admit that, as a person. He was without sin. But if without sin, He was without guilt. It was according to the Scrip- tures by the imputation to Him of sins not his own, that He bore our guilt, or assumed the responsibility of satisfying justice on our account. It is only by admitting that by being born of a woman, or becoming flesh, Christ placed Himself in the categoiy of sinful men, and became personally a sinner, and guilty in the sight of God, as all other men are, that it can be maintained that the as- sumption of our nature in itself involved the assumption of guilt, or that He thereby became responsible for all the sins which men posst'ssing that nature had committed.
4. It is another fatal objection to this scheme that it subverts the whole gospel plan of salvation. Instead of directing the soul to Christ, to his righteousness, and to his intercession ; that is, to wiiat is objective and out of itself, as the ground of its hope toward God, it turns the attention of the sinner in upon himself. The only righteousness he has on which to trust is within. He has a new nature, and because of that nature is and deserves to be, recon- ciled unto God and entitled to eternal life. It places Christ just as far from us as Adam is. As Adam is the source of a nature for which we are condemned, so Christ is the source of a nature for which we are justified and saved. The system, therefore, calls upon us to exchange a hope founded upon what Christ is and has done in our behalf, a hope which rests upon an infinitely meritoi'ious righteousness out of ourselves, for a hope founded on tlie glimmer of divine life which we find within ourselves. We may call this new nature by what high-sounding names we i:)lease. We may call it theanthropic, divine-human, or divine, it makes no difference. Whatever it is called, it is something so weak and so imperfect that it cannot satisfy ourselves, much less the infinitely holy and just God. To call on men to trust for their acceptance before God on the ground of what they are male by this inward
538 PART III. Cn. VII. — SATISFACTION OF CHRIST.
change, is to call upon them to build their eternal hopes upon a foundation which cannot sustain a straw. That this is the true view of the plan of salvation as proposed by these theolooians, notwithstanding the lofty terms in which they speak of Christ as our Saviour, is plain from the parallel which they constantly refer to between our relation to Christ and our relation to Adam. This is an analogy which the Apostle insists upon, and which as pre- sented by him is full of instruction and hope. Adam was the head and representative of his race. We stood our probation in him. His sin was putatively the sin of his posterity. It was the judicial ground of their condemnation. The penalty of that transgression was death, the loss of the life of God, as well as of his fellowship and favour. All mankind, therefore, represented by Adam in the first covenant came into the world in a state of condemnation and of spiritual death. He was a type of Christ, because Christ is the head and representative of his people. He fulfilled all righteousness in their behalf and in their stead. As Adam's disobedience was the ground of the condemnation of all who were in him, so Christ's obedience is the ground of the justification of all who are in Him ; and as spiritual death was the penal, and therefore certain conse- quence of our condemnation for the sin of Adam, so spiritual and eternal life is the covenanted, and therefore the certain and insep- arable consequence of our justification for the righteousness of Christ. But according to the modern speculative (or as it is called by Dorner,! " the regenerated ") theology, the parallel between Christ and Adam is very different. We are not condemned for Adam's sin, as his sin, but only for that sin as it was ours, commit- ted by us as partakers of the numerically same nature that sinned in him, and for the consequent corruption of our nature. The whole ground of our condemnation is subjective or iiiM'ard. We are condemned for what we are. In like manner we are justified for what we become through Christ. He assumed numerically the same nature that had sinned. He sanctified it, elevated it, and raised it to the power of a divine life by its union with his divine person, and He communicates this new, theanthropic nature to his people, and on the ground of what they thus become they are reconciled and saved. It is a favoui'ite and frequently occurring statement with these writers that Christ redeems us, not by what He does, but by what He is. His assumption of our nature was its redemption. Extreme spiritualism always ends in materialism.
1 See his Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie, p. 769, and onward. He dates this re- generation from Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, especially, of course the last